Monday, November 27, 2006

Strategy and Tactics

Pajamas Media reports on efforts to save
Afghanistan. You know, the Good War.

President Bush will meet on Tuesday with NATO allies on the growing terror
violence in the other front in the Global War on Terror. The president will
make a stop in Estonia on his way to a NATO summit in Riga, Latvia. NATO
military commander (of international forces in southern Afghanistan) General
David J. Richards (UK) cites the need for 2500 more troops and various
equipment in the country, but “NATO Secretary-General Jaap de Hoop Scheffer
said on the eve of the summit he had no concrete offers of more troops to
join the 32,000-strong NATO-led peacekeeping force […], and key European
nations remain reluctant to lift restrictions on the use of their forces.”
The key European nation named? France.

But Afghanistan is not as good as the Gooder War. Kosovo. Time
reports:

Are the 31,000 troops in Afghanistan enough? More troops could be put to
good use: NATO has 16,000 soldiers in Kosovo, which is less than 2% the
size of Afghanistan. But with major contributing countries already
stretched in Iraq, Kosovo and Lebanon, a big infusion of new soldiers is not
realistic. So the Riga horse-trading will concentrate on a related problem:
that commanders often can't deploy existing troops as they would like because
of national limits—or "caveats"—on their use. U.S., British,
Canadian and Dutch troops are doing most of the frontline fighting; support
from many of the other 33 countries in the NATO-led International Security
Assistance Force [ISAF ] ranges from secondary to symbolic. At Tuesday
night's dinner with other NATO leaders, U.S. President George W. Bush is
likely to take up the demands of ISAF commander General David Richards that
national governments loosen the strings. He will get support from Polish
Defense Minister Radek Sikorski, who told TIME: "What is the use of
having the troops there if you can't use them when they are needed?"

It is, ahem, well known that more boots on the ground are required to fight a
successful counterinsurgency. Every European military could see the fundamental
mistake of Donald Rumsfeld, that rank amateur who was the Secretary of Defense,
was to starve Iraq of troops. But in Afghanistan and Kosovo who is providing the
actual combat troops? The men under that military incompetent, Donald Rumsfeld.

Commentary

Sometimes I think one of the main swindles of the media coverage of the War on Terror was to ascribe to tactics the faults of strategy. There were endless discussions about oil spots, more troops, less troops, sophisticated political ploys etc. But did the many of the critics really want to win? If not in Iraq, then what about in Kosovo and Afghanistan, places where they were presumably committed to victory?

2 Comments:

Westhawk has up an interesting take on developing Marine Corps formations. While I see the merit of Westhawk's conclusions when the Corps is on the offense, for the sorts of policing activities needed to subdue cities such as Fallujah and Ramadi, more boots on the ground are better, IMHO.

W:You're last paragraph really nails it. For the left, their reaction to 9-11 was an overreaction. What could they have been thinking, that retaliation and war would actually solve anything. They've been trying to sweep their 6-months of commitment to the security of their nation under the rug since.

Now, having collected their former composure, the words and rhetoric of their former selves drones on.